Crisis Housing
The Vancouver Art Gallery looks at visionary Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s temporary housing for people displaced by disasters. Astonishingly, his shelters are made from paper.
Shigeru Ban, "Paper Log House," 2018
site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 11 to October 8, 2018 (photo by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery)
It’s a critical need for international humanitarian relief – inexpensive and easily built temporary housing for victims of natural disasters and human conflicts.
But shelters made from paper tubes?
It seems counterintuitive. Yet visionary Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has created just such emergency housing with a material that sounds like something the big bad wolf might just blow down. His surprisingly durable and adaptable structures resemble, to Canadian eyes, a modest one-room log cabin.
The Vancouver Art Gallery recently set up one of Ban’s houses at Offsite, an outdoor public art space several blocks from the gallery. The structure is slightly adapted from the Kobe Paper Log House that Ban, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, designed in 1995 based on his knowledge of recyclable materials, particularly paper and cardboard.
Despite Vancouver’s notoriously inclement weather, the shelter is holding up just fine, says Bruce Grenville, the Vancouver Art Gallery curator who oversaw the project. He compares the paper logs to large mailing tubes, and notes they were coated with polyurethane.
“It just provides the waterproofing for them,” he says. “You can lay on a bunch of coats in a day or so and you’ve got a very waterproof structure. They last for years, some of them. They’ve had to last for years.”
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Shigeru Ban, “Paper Log House, Kobe, Japan,” 1995 (photo by Takanobu Sakuma)
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Shigeru Ban, “Paper Log House, Turkey,” 2000 (photo by Shigeru Ban Architects)
Ban first designed the house after a magnitude 6.9 earthquake destroyed much of Kobe, a major port city in Japan. More than 6,000 people died and some 200,000 lost their homes.
He went on to create emergency structures elsewhere in the world, working through the Voluntary Architects’ Network, a non-governmental group he started in the 1990s. Last year, Ban received a Mother Teresa Award, which recognizes individuals and groups that promote peace, equality and social justice.
Grenville says the gallery initially asked Ban to design a structure specifically for Vancouver, as the city will likely experience a major natural disaster at some point.
Ban quickly pointed out that designing in advance doesn’t work. He responds only to specific events because shelters need to be constructed from materials close at hand as emergency services are usually strained just getting food and medical aid to victims.
Shigeru Ban, "Paper Log House," 2018
site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 11 to October 8, 2018 (photo by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery)
But designs can be adapted for different places, says Grenville. For instance, in colder countries the tubes can be stuffed with insulating materials. In hotter places, like India, cracks can be left between the logs to create ventilation.
The exhibition includes a large photomural documenting Ban’s global humanitarian efforts. Grenville says the gallery hopes to hold a public talk by Ban in the fall, but details are yet to be nailed down.
The Offsite show runs concurrently with Cabin Fever, a gallery exhibition that traces the history of the cabin in Canada and the United States. It opens June 9 and is on view until Sept. 30.
Ban, born in 1957, set up his architectural firm in Tokyo after studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York. He is sometimes categorized as an ecological architect because the materials he uses are sustainable and can be recycled. For instance, the Japanese pavilion he created for Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, was recycled back into paper pulp. ■
Shigeru Ban, "Paper Log House," 2018
site-specific installation at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, May 11 to October 8, 2018 (photo by Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery)
Offsite: Shigeru Ban is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Institute of Asian Art and runs from May 11 to Oct. 8, 2018.
